Agenda item - Chair's Communications

The Chair of the Board will start the meeting with a short update on recent developments on health and wellbeing.

25.1    The Chair gave the following communications:

I would like to open the meeting by thanking all the colleagues that supported last month’s Health & Wellbeing Board development session. It was great to bring together Board Members with other colleagues who are active in their leadership of our health & care partnership and start our work around the development of the Board and the refresh of our Health & Wellbeing Strategy.

I was encouraged by the results of our review of Board effectiveness, that partners felt we were good at delivering our statutory duties as a Board. It was also positive that partners felt we were effective at creating a strong sense of Place and ensuring our delivery had a strong local focus.  I think this reflects our recent work around the health counts survey, our JSNAs and the evolving work of our local Integrated Community (neighbourhood) Team partnerships across the city. So, I am pleased that this work is part of our agenda today as we look at the progress on our Shared Delivery Plan objectives.

It was also important that we got constructive feedback that there is more we can do to support our joint working and strategic planning to improve the health and wellbeing of the local population. We have the Better Care Fund on our agenda today, as Chair I am keen to see us continue to improve our leadership of this important fund that should drive local integration ensuring that our plan and associated investment is driving improvement in local health outcomes and enabling the new neighbourhood health reform.

In our recent Board Development session, our work together on assessing our Board effectiveness led naturally into us considering the latest data we hold on the health of our local population and how this should inform the development of our Joint Health & Wellbeing Strategy. There were some consistent themes that emerged from our discussions on the data; one of these was the need for our strategy refresh to enable a more focused approach to targeting key population health priorities. There was a broad agreement that our strategy should have strong focus on prevention, local health inequalities and that Health & Wellbeing Boards are uniquely placed to focus on the wider determinants of health.

I know that colleagues will be using all the valuable feedback collected in our development session to produce a more detailed scope for our strategy refresh and a model of Board development for us to consider and work on at our next Health & Wellbeing Board development session in March.

I would also like to take the opportunity to welcome Monica Fletcher OBE to the Board. Monica is the ICB Deputy Chair and will replace Stephen Lightfoot at the Board. Monica brings with her a wealth of experience, having originally worked as a nurse, and latterly as an NHS manager and an academic. I’m sure she will be a valuable addition to our Health & Wellbeing Board.

Finally, just to note that there is a minor change to today’s agenda. I’ve been asked to take Item 32 Shared Delivery Plan Progress Report ahead of Item 31 Better Care Fund: Assurance Against BCF Delivery.